Ted Budd: “I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding. I also want to thank Chairman Hensarling for his dedicated leadership…”

“I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding. I also want to thank Chairman Hensarling for his dedicated leadership of his committee. I appreciate all he did to bring my legislation, H.R. 5036, to the floor. I also want to thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Lynch), my co-lead on the bill, for his efforts, his experience, and his knowledge. It only made the bill better, so I appreciated working with him. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of my bipartisan legislation, the Financial Technology Protection Act. We all know that illicit financing networks are the lynchpin of any terrorist group's, criminal organization's, or rogue state's operations. As we move into an increasingly digital world, criminals and terrorists will start to use these new technologies that are available to them. That presents a problem. That problem is that we know that criminals use digital currencies through dark net markets to criminalize and to monetize cyber attacks. There is documented evidence that terrorists are increasingly using these currencies. {time} 1800 The RAND Corporation has some good supporting evidence on this. The bottom line is that the Federal Government has to be one step ahead of the illicit actors in this new space without threatening technological innovation, and that is what H.R. 5036 will do.…”